Shining (star)light on the search for life

In the hunt for life on other worlds, astronomers scour over planets that are light-years away. They need ways to identify life from afar—but what counts as good evidence?

Our own planet provides some inspiration. Microbes fill the air with methane; photosynthesizing plants expel oxygen. Perhaps these gases might be found wherever life has taken hold.

But on worlds very different from our own, putative signs of life can be stirred up by non-biological processes. To know a true sign when you see it, astronomer Kevin France at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says, you must look beyond the planet itself, all the way to the gleaming star it orbits.

To this end, France and his team designed the SISTINE mission. Flying on a sounding rocket for a 15-minute flight, it will observe far-off stars to help interpret signs of life on the planets that orbit them. The mission will launch from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the early morning hours of Aug. 5, 2019.

When Earth Is a Bad Example

Shortly after Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, it was enveloped by a noxious atmosphere. Volcanoes spewed methane and sulfur. The air teemed with up to 200 times more carbon dioxide than today's levels.

It wasn't for another billion and a half years that molecular oxygen, which contains two oxygen atoms, entered the scene. It was a waste product, discarded by ancient bacteria through photosynthesis. But it kick-started what became known as the Great Oxidization Event, permanently changing Earth's atmosphere and paving the way for more complex lifeforms.

The young Earth's atmosphere might have looked like this artist's interpretation -- a pale orange dot. Credit: NASA/GSFC/F. Reddy

"We would not have large amounts of oxygen in our atmosphere if we didn't have that surface life," France said.

Oxygen is known as a biomarker: a chemical compound associated with life. Its presence in Earth's atmosphere hints at the lifeforms lurking below. But as sophisticated computer models have now shown, biomarkers on Earth aren't always so trustworthy for exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars elsewhere in the universe.

M-dwarfs generate intense ultraviolet light. When that light struck the simulated Earth-like planet, it ripped the carbon from carbon dioxide, leaving behind free molecular oxygen. UV light also broke up molecules of water vapor, releasing single oxygen atoms. The atmospheres created oxygen—but without life.

Earth's low oxygen levels without life were a kind of fluke—thanks, in part, to our interaction with our Sun. Exoplanet systems with different stars might be different. "If we think we understand a planet's atmosphere but don't understand the star it orbits, we're probably going to get things wrong," France said.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of Planetary Nebula NGC 6826 Jan. 27, 1996. SISTINE will image NGC 6826 during its first flight to calibrate its instruments. Credit: HST/NASA/ESA

To Know a Planet, Study its Star

France and his team designed SISTINE to better understand host stars and their effects on exoplanet atmospheres. Short for Suborbital Imaging Spectrograph for Transition region Irradiance from Nearby Exoplanet host stars, SISTINE measures the high-energy radiation from these stars. With knowledge about host stars' spectra, scientists can better distinguish true biomarkers from false-positives on their orbiting planets.

To make these measurements, SISTINE uses a spectrograph, an instrument that separates light into its component parts.

"Spectra are like fingerprints," said Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who uses the methodology. "It's how we find out what things are made of, both on our planet and as we look out into the universe."

SISTINE measures spectra in wavelengths from 100 to 160 nanometers, a range of far-UV light that, among other things, can create oxygen, possibly generating a false-positive. Light output in this range varies with the mass of the star—meaning stars of different masses will almost surely differ from our Sun.

SISTINE can also measure flares, or bright stellar explosions, which release intense doses of far-UV light all at once. Frequent flares could turn a habitable environment into a lethal one.

The SISTINE mission will fly on a Black Brant IX sounding rocket. Sounding rockets make short, targeted flights into space before falling back to Earth; SISTINE's flight gives it about five minutes observing time. Though brief, SISTINE can see stars in wavelengths inaccessible to observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Alpha Centauri system in optical (main) and X-ray (inset) light. Only the two largest stars, Alpha Cen A and B, are visible. These two stars will be the targets of SISTINE's second flight. Credit: Zdenek Bardon/NASA/CXC/Univ. of Colorado/T. Ayres et al.

Two launches are scheduled. The first, from White Sands in August, will calibrate the instrument. SISTINE will fly 174 miles above Earth's surface to observe NGC 6826, a cloud of gas surrounding a white dwarf star located about 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. NGC 6826 is bright in UV light and shows sharp spectral lines—a clear target for checking their equipment.

After calibration, the second launch will follow in 2020 from the Arnhem Space Centre in Nhulunbuy, Australia. There they will observe the UV spectra of Alpha Centauri A and B, the two largest stars in the three-star Alpha Centauri system. At 4.37 light-years away, these stars are our closest stellar neighbors and prime targets for exoplanet observations. (The system is home to Proxima Centauri B, the closest exoplanet to Earth.)

Testing New Tech

Both SISTINE's observations and the technology used to acquire them are designed with future missions in mind.

One is NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, currently set to launch in 2021. The deep space observatory will see visible to mid-infrared light—useful for detecting exoplanets orbiting M-dwarfs. SISTINE observations can help scientists understand the light from these stars in wavelengths that Webb can't see.

SISTINE also carries novel UV detector plates and new optical coatings on its mirrors, designed to help them better reflect rather than absorb extreme UV light. Flying this technology on SISTINE helps test them for NASA's future large UV/optical space telescopes.

By capturing stellar spectra and advancing technology for future missions, SISTINE links what we know with what we've yet to learn. That's when the real work starts. "Our job as astronomers is to piece those different data sets together to tell a complete story," Rigby said.

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Shining (star)light on the search for life (2019, August 2)
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User comments

Non-Biological processes are unable to create Life. Scientists still believe that Life can be created by just bringing some chemical derivatives together and expecting them to stick together.That is NOT Life, even if they did stick together. The "life-force" will still be missing from that blob.

Non-Biological processes are unable to create Life. Scientists still believe that Life can be created by just bringing some chemical derivatives together and expecting them to stick together.That is NOT Life, even if they did stick together. The "life-force" will still be missing from that blob.

Inspired as she was by the transcendent and compassionate Bodhisattvas, who had thrown off the shackles of worldly blindness, and saw directly into the heart of every mundane mystery of this coarse and encumbering sphere of ordinary material existence, they should have listened to Madame Blavatsksy, the fools.

" When the life force is disconnected with one set of atoms it becomes immediately attracted by others; but in doing so..."

There is nothing magical or special about life. We are just machines made of flesh and bones evolved over billions of years from singled celled organisms. The exact details are a bit of mystery, which isn't surprising considering it happened over a billion years ago.

There is nothing magical or special about life. We are just machines made of flesh and bones evolved over billions of years from singled celled organisms. The exact details are a bit of mystery, which isn't surprising considering it happened over a billion years ago.

Fully agreed. Nothing magic or unreal in evolution, although awe, beauty and greatness. It is just a matter of finding out the many underlying laws of nature and its processes. However, let us not call the living beings machines, they have some extras, spirit and consciousness.

Surveillance_Egg: In a closed system, ice is extremely improbable to form from water, yet it does happen in open system, where entropy increases elsewhere. Life on earth is similarly an open system which bathed in the suns visible light energy whose generates massive entropy increaases by re-radiating that into the vacuum of space as infrared. Paradoxically, order (life) is required to maximize disorder in the shortest time. While it may not be easy for such entropy-maximizing systems to arise, they probably will under the right circumstances. Earth's being not tidally locked with moderate temps creates many cycles that that allow complex chemistry to arise naturally, and this is seen in similar laboratory conditions as well. Life creates maximal disorder in the shortest time possible. Of course, as intelligent beings, we can follow our own paradigm and don't need to be nihilist, but that is our likely our origin in thermodynamics.

No, its not "missing" because there is no "life-force". Star wars never happened and Darth Vader and life-force are all just made up science fiction and not in anyway based on any scientific evidence.

It's somewhat bewildering to see, here in the 21st century--in a science-oriented publication--a term like "life-'force' ", which should have been in its mystical death-throes even in the late 19th. Although it does remain that the Theosophical Society still has active members in the thousands reading and replicating that and endless streams of similar gobbledygook.

yep... the stuporstitious poltroons such as sillyegghead are proof for my Theory of Stupid Design

seu, shouldn't you be over on the YEC site? debating the merits of Pythagorean prejudice against eating kidney beans?or how to manifest spirit guides with your Ouija board driven arcana technology? or why disestablishmentarism is a buy-product of biblical coded kabbala fortune-telling?

yep... the stuporstitious poltroons such as sillyegghead are proof for my Theory of Stupid Design

seu, shouldn't you be over on the YEC site? debating the merits of Pythagorean prejudice against eating kidney beans?or how to manifest spirit guides with your Ouija board driven arcana technology? or why disestablishmentarism is a buy-product of biblical coded kabbala fortune-telling?

I don't think even any YEC site would mysteriously wave around a term like "life- 'force' " without at least some intelligent-agent. "Life" is the capacity of a chemical system to self-replicate and multiply from a fixed set of chemical subunits. No YECer, in t h i s century, would argue that such a system, arising supernaturally, naturally, or from within a laboratory, could reasonably be denied the label 'life'.

The New York Times extrapolated the Scripps team's findings to an even higher level: "The work also gives some support to the concept that life can exist elsewhere in the universe using genetics different from those on Earth." Whether on earth or elsewhere in the universe, the IDEA of life evolving from nonliving elements through natural processes WILL NEVER OVERCOME the truth of Genesis 1, or the tried and tested biological law that life comes from life. [caps added]

50 years ago the wording would have been something like this: 'the stupid Darwian delusion will be forever totally destroyed by the fact...' &etc.And what does 'tried and tested' mean? Formerly it would have been 'verified and proven'. YECers are no longer sure of themselves. They seem to be writing with posterity in mind, having no intention of recapitulating the idiocy of those who 'proved' the non-existence of exoplanets altogether.

i have wondered why the sanguine savages have (as far as i know) not been willing to defend the doctrine of "if there has been one miracle?" "Then all other miracles are possibleno matter how implausible or fabulist the claim"

Non-Biological processes are unable to create Life. Scientists still believe that Life can be created by just bringing some chemical derivatives together and expecting them to stick together.That is NOT Life, even if they did stick together. The "life-force" will still be missing from that blob.

Life actually emerged as a property from prebiotic precursors, it was not technically created from them. No, scientists do not believe that because it is impossible. You cannot simply "assemble" life (in a reductionist way), you need to recreate the conditions that caused simple microbial life to spontaneously emerge from the prebiotic soup (in a *systemic* way).

Reductionism cannot lead to life, but a systemic approach could, so systems theory is your friend. I certainly wouldn't call it "life-force" but in the case of life "the whole *is* more than the sum of its parts", an explicitly systemic idea formulated by none other than Aristotle. There is nothing mystical about it though.

A lot of assumptions are made here, such as microbial life being simple or that natural processes, despite repair mechanisms in place, can overcome our DNA's relatively aggressive rate of devolution. The latter has already been empirically and independently tested. The better question might be how natural selection actually stacks up against mutations, and why we assume life is so simple that it can show up anywhere in space when we have yet to answer that question on our own planet. As far as the articles in nature journal are concerned (not just with human DNA, but with yeast and other ancient DNA), it is still being posed as a question. Lest someone has found an article they can point me to. Intrigue me ya'll. ;)https://www.natur...864.html

No, its not "missing" because there is no "life-force". Star wars never happened and Darth Vader and life-force are all just made up science fiction and not in anyway based on any scientific evidence.

says humy

As usual, you are bringing nonsensical sci-fi into a somewhat 'serious' discussion. Perhaps YOU are amongst the Walking Dead, and YOUR Life Force, if you ever had one, has left and an automaton/robot has replaced it.In that case, you mustn't try to pass yourself off as a 'living organism', but rather only a mixture of chemicals that have been induced into giving you the ability to sit there and type silly shite to impress the likes of whoever thinks you are interesting.

I will have to Block/Ignore you, humy. I only talk to those whom I ASSUME are amongst the living.

Surveillance_Egg: In a closed system, ice is extremely improbable to form from water, yet it does happen in open system, where entropy increases elsewhere. Life on earth is similarly an open system which bathed in the suns visible light energy whose generates massive entropy increaases by re-radiating that into the vacuum of space as infrared. Paradoxically, order (life) is required to maximize disorder in the shortest time. While it may not be easy for such entropy-maximizing systems to arise, they probably will under the right circumstances. Earth's being not tidally locked with moderate temps creates many cycles that that allow complex chemistry to arise naturally, and this is seen in similar laboratory conditions as well. Life creates maximal disorder in the shortest time possible. Of course, as intelligent beings, we can follow our own paradigm and don't need to be nihilist, but that is our likely our origin in thermodynamics.

Notice that those who can't stand the thought of the existence of a "Life Force", somehow have no trouble in admitting that if a human or animal organism stops, for any reason, eating, drinking water, breathing air, and excreting wastes, that organism will die - meaning that the "Life Force" goes out of that organism at the moment of its death. At that moment, the death of that organism where everything it had done prior to its death - ceases completely. Since it is no longer alive, all the chemicals injected into it cannot bring it back to the living.Some times, as in the case of a heart attack, it might be possible to bring it back to life by starting the heart beats again. But eventually, that too, will not work as the Life Force slowly ebbs away.Scientists try to create Life by methods that they believe occurred when chemicals gathered together a billion years ago. But try as they may, they still cannot create Life, and never will.

LOL Schnieb seems to be in a foul mood. As I don't subscribe to any manmade religions/beliefs, I have no idea what is a Xenu. Sounds like some kind of African antelope.Hmmm, Schreib mentions "stick it in, twist it, and snap it off". Schneib has really gone queer now.That's for sure.

Weak, @XenuScientologyEggUnit. Go suck your elron's dick. That got you all excited the last time. Very revealing. To find out what people are when they lie, poke them until they react. And your reaction shows you're a lying denying scientologist.

A Scientologist? Not me. Perhaps you are referring to Tom Cruise. I see that your homosexual tendencies are rising to the fore, and your true self is emerging. I am going to have to write out a complaint to phys.org management against your homosexual advances toward me, as I am not into such indecent and sinful behaviours as you obviously indulge in.Perhaps you believe that physorg commenters/readers are so stupid that they are easily misled into believing your LIES. Since you are obviously demonically-possessed, it is not surprising that you would tell LIES and expect humans to believe such LIES.You impress your Master, Satan well. But he will either eat your soul, or give your soul over to us at your death. I can guarantee that you will suffer horribly.

LOL I have NO vulnerabilities. I could crush your head like a sponge if I felt like doing it. But you are not worth the effort of flying to your location just to crush your head. And the demon who is in you will only try to escape, and we can't have that, can we.

You've been making claims about being in telepathic communication with aliens, @XenuScientologyLizardUnit. Only psychotic nutjob scientologist liar deniers react when someone tells them to go suck their holy elron's dick.

You flinched and everyone saw it. With @Phyllis Harmonic gone you are my meat. Enjoy it. I sure will.

You've been making claims about being in telepathic communication with aliens, @XenuScientologyLizardUnit. Only psychotic nutjob scientologist liar deniers react when someone tells them to go suck their holy elron's dick.

You flinched and everyone saw it. With @Phyllis Harmonic gone you are my meat. Enjoy it. I sure will.

The article context is old. But SISTINE will be a useful instrument as it will capture star-planet interactions and elucidate planet thermodynamics. Earlier papers looking at this has hypothesized that life may leave enough of an imprint to distingush between biotic andc abiotic processes.

"Non-Biological processes are unable to create Life."

biological law

No, no such 'law* in biology. That has long been rejected by observation.

- Earth emerged sterile, but we now see life, hence natural processes leads to life.

- And we have an independent test by phylogenies now, geological systems evolved over a half alive universal ancestor lineage to modern independent cells [ https://www.natur...l2016116 ]. The natural process that leads to life is evolution.

Can we just drop the superstitious originated claim, since it does not hold up to observation and has not done so for a century or so? We need new erroneous superstitious claims to be amused by.

let us not call the living beings machines, they have some extras, spirit and consciousness.

Live consist of no more and no less than biochemical machinery, we know that now from the LHC results 2012-2017. The Higgs discovery and enough tests told us it is a standard Higgs. and that we have a complete understanding of standard particles and their significant interactions.

The latter year was when prominent physicists started to inform the public that there are "no ghosts", meaning the biochemistry is all there is.

Bad news for (self)delusion of religion, which saw the science of the first two decades do the same number on them as it did on astrology a century before. I.e. star patterns and 'gods' are imaginary constructs - Hubble et al star distance measurements showing wide separation vs Planck cosmic background measurements showing a 100 % natural universe; horoscopes and prayer/'afterlife' does not work - psychological vs religion studies blind tests, LHC.

Wake period consciousness is an evolutionary trait, it has not evolved in organisms without a nervous system say.

Life ... entropy-maximizing systems

.

I doubt that, where is the evidence? It is a fact that cells increases entropy flow to space in the volume where they exist, but the rest is poorly researched. As we can see from phylogenies, evolution may suffice to explain all of life from rock to cell.

Same with tidal lock, where is the evidence that is a factor? Just this week a paper published on superEarths under tidal lock that showed they efficiently redistributed heat if retained atmosphere properties scaled with planet mass.

You cannot simply "assemble" life (in a reductionist way),

? "Reductionist" is philosophy.

We have assembled live cells since 2010 [ https://en.wikipe...tic_life ]. As for how evolution also "assembled" life from geology over half alive cells to live cells, see my first link in comments above.

a) Feynman diagram perturbation theory allow quantum field research to approximate *all* field interactions by particle collisions. Even if they could in principle be done by happenstance "magic" agency. By counting all possible diagrams (summing over all possible pathways), we can check the diagrams back in time due to the symmetry.

b) That is not even necessary. By testing the majority of collision pathways in the tested model and check rates to high precision - I believe something like 10 significant digits - we can distinguish between significant interactions and insignificant. The standard particle model underlying chemistry vs exotic interactions such as neutrino mass oscillation (not SM).

Result was there is insufficient unknown interaction to see the brain state from "outside" - no 'soul' and no 'afterlife' backup copy. The medieval philosophers lost their famous "wager".

You go very wrong when categorising me as a religionist? It is not my mistake that many terms of our language, such as spirit and ghost have over millennia been abused by religions and sects.

So when I speak about a "spirit" I mean one piece of energy form which is assumed to act as the innermost engine of all living organisms, humans, animals, plants, making them and keeping them that, alive. This does not happen outside or beyond the reality of our universe, does not break any correct law of physics, it is just a natural part of the existence. So when an embryo around the 21st day begins his/her own autonomous life, with the heart starting to pump, that is the moment of the spirit-energy arriving and beginning its work. The same can be said for the moment human, animal or plant bodies enter an irreversible state of decay, because of the energy-form leaving their body. Sure, what I am writing here is a for the time being not yet easily fully verifiable thesis.-tbc-

-continuation-But the fact of nowadays science not yet able to measure these energies does certainly not invalidate the working assumption. In my opinion it is not helpful to naively think and claim that today's physics – having merely reached the level of quantum – would already be able to fully explain life, death and the specifics of evolution, while only understanding physics down to the level of relatively coarse material and energy form aspects.

Actually, most all forms of life orginated in the Cambrian explosion around 500 million years ago, and lasted only 10 million to 70 million years.

says Old_C_Code

Perhaps Merrit actually meant to say, around 1 billion years ago (or less) rather than 'over billions of years', where planet Earth was still in a state of flux and continents were either splitting or joining over those "billions of years". In the Cambrian explosion, the Life Forms had already EVOLVED from the simple one-celled organisms that had continued to evolve into multi-celled Life Forms. Then further evolved into animals and plants. That evolution cycle was within the 1 BILLION year period from the first single cells created in the waters of Earth - through the Cambrian - up to now, where evolution is still going on. There was no Life on Earth prior to one Billion years ago.

Life begins with ONE CELL. This is scientifically proven with the discovery that two cells join, one from the female and one from the male. And from those two cells that merged, it becomes 4, then 8, then 16 - growing exponentially into a NEW organism that has its OWN Life Force and genetics from its parents.

Result was there is insufficient unknown interaction to see the brain state from "outside" - no 'soul' and no 'afterlife' backup copy. The medieval philosophers lost their famous "wager".

says Torbjorn Larsson

Torbjorn is one of the more bigoted god-haters, second only to Schneib and several others who frequent physorg and other science sites to lament the non-conformity to the rule that if someone loves science, then it is also impossible to love the Creator God. Torbjorn is of the opinion that Matter/Energy created itself somehow, with the result that single-celled Life Forms just happened to program themselves using bits and pieces of elements in a random fashion without rhyme or reason for doing so.And yet. Torbjorn believes in the "Scientific Method".

Result was there is insufficient unknown interaction to see the brain state from "outside" - no 'soul' and no 'afterlife' backup copy. The medieval philosophers lost their famous "wager".

says Torbjorn Larsson

Torbjorn is one of the more glaring examples of outraged bigoted hatred of/toward nonconformity to his textbook learning and the "Scientific Method", whereby if his eyes are unable to SEE something, then he can only hasten to say that it is impossible that it exists. Torbjorn wears his blinders with joy and makes his comments in physorg to ENSURE that the new initiates will remain in his camp of followers of the imperious god-hating membership.

Life begins with ONE CELL. This is scientifically proven with the discovery that two cells join, one from the female and one from the male.

So you mean life *continues* when two living cells join, or are you saying the egg precedes the chicken?

asks Protoplasmic

The two cells that have joined/merged, one from the female and one from the male ARE the continuation of the contributors of each cell from both parents. The parents both contribute of themselves to bring a new Life Form into existence. This continuation of Life ensures that the human race/animal/chicken is regenerated. This process has gone on since the first cells were created in the waters of Earth. Evolutionary processes were required to promote health and the ability to adjust to possibly difficult conditions. I still don't understand WHY certain Christian sects refuse to consider Evolution as part of the Life process. Not only is it scientific, but it is Logical.

Notice that those who can't stand the thought of the existence of a "Life Force", somehow have no trouble in admitting that if a human or animal organism stops, for any reason, eating, drinking water, breathing air, and excreting wastes, that organism will die - meaning that the "Life Force" goes out of that organism at the moment of its death.

Using the same arguments, a car engine has "life-force" until you stop giving it gas and oil what it needs to "live". If you let it rust long enough, it will never "live" again.

Sea mammals have unused hip bones still. Clearly indicating they were once land roaming.

This is EXTREMELY illogical, but the hipbones are in fact true.

So calling Evolution logical is definitely wrong.

says Old_C_Code

As you say, the hip bones are an indication that they were once 'land mammals'. Stop and think about it, OCC. What could possibly have driven those mammals to return to the sea in spite of having hip bones? Perhaps the land mass that they were living on was inundated by rising seas, OR the land mass began to sink INTO the sea; and they had nowhere else to go but into the water?

What else could they DO, Old_C_C? As mammals, even sea mammals, they still have to come up for air. But if their land home was gone, where else could they go? It's not like if YOUR home was flooded, you can go up to higher ground. They survived by returning to their original ancestral home.

Notice that those who can't stand the thought of the existence of a "Life Force", somehow have no trouble in admitting that if a human or animal organism stops, for any reason, eating, drinking water, breathing air, and excreting wastes, that organism will die - meaning that the "Life Force" goes out of that organism at the moment of its death.

Using the same arguments, a car engine has "life-force" until you stop giving it gas and oil what it needs to "live". If you let it rust long enough, it will never "live" again.

says Cortezz

You could say that it is based on the same 'principle'. Cars need energy to operate, just as humans/animals need energy. However, a car is not going to start itself up and drive down the road without a driver, unless its on a steep hill with the brakes not working. Humans/animals operate as mechanisms, just like cars. But there the comparisons end. Only living organisms have a Life Force, not a piece of manufactured metal.

Hello Cortezz,At the risk of annoying you with my unsolicited answer, you might want to give a look at this very round and sound model about "life force"/life-energy/spirit, our consciousness, the explanation of life after death and the various things directly related to these big questions, that are for the time being beyond scientific measurement and verification reach. And I am saying for the time being, as this is not just another esoteric rubbish and delusional religious phantasy:

Hello Cortezz,At the risk of annoying you with my unsolicited answer, you might want to give a look at this very round and sound model about "life force"/life-energy/spirit, our consciousness, the explanation of life after death and the various things directly related to these big questions, that are for the time being beyond scientific measurement and verification reach. And I am saying for the time being, as this is not just another esoteric rubbish and delusional religious phantasy:

So, you are a bit like me, Cortezz, no longer wasting any valuable lifetime with Netflix and 90+ minutes silly entertainment movies. I have just checked, FIGU Canada had been so kind to produce the executive summary version for fast thinking, busy persons. They brought it down to 13.5 minutes:https://www.youtu...SuQjGUhA

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Shining (star)light on the search for life

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